The Eternal Footman Read online

  “Gerard always pictured his brain supplanting the obelisk in Saint Peter’s Square,” said Nora. “Will his disciples go along with that?”

  Marbles answered without hesitation. If Korty wanted his brain in Saint Peter’s Square, then that’s where his fans would put it. Besides, Cinecittà was at the moment underwater. An enraged mob—furious at God (what was left of Him) and Catholicism (what was left of it) for failing to stop the plague—had dynamited the Garibaldi Dam, flooded the Ben-Hur quarry, and destroyed the reliquary. The holy bones had washed away down the Tiber and into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  From the cerebellum Nora and Marbles moved to the left hemisphere.

  “Are the rumors true?” asked Marbles, reveling in Gerard’s exquisite, albeit disheveled, re-creation of Isaac Newton confecting rainbows. “Did Korty end up carving idols for the Lucido Clinic?”

  Leading Marbles from Newton to Charles Darwin, and from there to Albert Einstein, Nora recounted Gerard’s days in Mexico: his employment by Lucido’s church, his disillusionment with Lucido, his obsession with bequeathing the future a Stone Gospel based on Parables for a Post-Theistic Age. She told Marbles how, after her fetch had shown her two incompatible versions of the next millennium—a desirable one derived from Ockham’s vision and a depressing one centered around a neo-Luddite nature cult—she’d pledged herself to the brain’s survival.

  In the Hall of Artistic Passion, Nora changed the subject to Marbles’s friend and colleague, Anthony Van Horne.

  “I owe you a great debt. You pointed me to Anthony. He took me to Mexico, and then came Kevin’s remission, seven whole weeks.”

  “I’d settle for one extra week with Naomi. No more clinic?”

  “Incinerated.”

  Marbles arighted the jade figurine of Dante Alighieri, centerpiece of Gerard’s homage to The Divine Comedy. He turned toward Nora, offering her one of his rare smiles. “Big job ahead, huh?”

  “Big job,” she agreed.

  “How does this sound? We take the Queen in tow to Galveston, then travel along the coast till we find a gantry. We load the brain onto the Bangor’s weather deck, plot a course for Rome, and set sail the next day.”

  “My last delivery.”

  “Huh?”

  “I used to drive a delivery truck.” She began reassembling the Bach exhibit. “Kevin’s fetch told me I loved my child too much.”

  “Ridiculous,” said Marbles.

  “I can’t seem to shake the thought.”

  “If I’ve learned one thing from the plague, Nora, it’s this: Never suppose a fetch knows how the world works. Death is a lousy philosopher, and that’s the truth.”

  Like many an author with a best-seller under his belt, Anthony Van Horne nurtured a strong desire to do it all over again. Now, suddenly, he had the material, a sequel to The Gospel According to Popeye recounting his latest adventures with the Corpus Dei—including the lucky breaks and brushes with catastrophe that had marked his journey from Coatzacoalcos to Los Angeles, where they’d ended up living in an Inglewood boardinghouse run by an affable crook named Alice Railsback. He had no immediate incentive for producing such a chronicle, of course, North America and Europe currently being without publishing industries, but one sunny June morning he found himself starting a manuscript anyway, under the provisional title The Valley of Illusion.

  When Anthony wasn’t working on his book, he and Cassie spent their time dragging Stevie from one alleged wonder-worker to another. They visited homeopaths and acupuncturists, aromatherapists and iridologists, Yaqui sorcerers and Zuni adepts. But the boy remained a stage-four abulic, enwebbed in pocks and grooves, fighting a hopeless war with Dominic.

  Then one day a miracle occurred.

  At 4:00 P.M. on a hot July afternoon, Stevie wandered downstairs, entered the front parlor, and stumbled into his father’s arms like an Augmentation Institute customer undergoing a thaw. His pocks were gone; his fissures had vanished. “Dominic’s dead,” he said. Anthony’s muscles went slack. His orange-juice glass hit the hardwood floor and shattered. From the center of his soul burst a cry so jubilant that half of Alice Railsback’s clientele came running into the room. Taking his son in hand, he fled the boardinghouse, jumped into Lucido’s car, and raced down the deserted San Diego Freeway. He exited at Braddock Drive and pulled up outside the Culver City Coven and Spiritual Healing Institute, an unassuming stucco house where Cassie had gone to place their son’s name on a waiting list. Stevie in tow, Anthony charged unannounced into the vestibule, prompting his wife to shout with joy and a startled witch to pull a gun on him.

  As the subsequent month unfolded, it became clear—could it be? was it possible?—that the plague was lifting. No more levelers. No more omnipresent pyres. Everyone in Los Angeles had a different explanation. Some said Jesus Christ had eradicated the epidemic through divine fiat, an overture to his imminent return. Others said benevolent extraterrestrials had bathed the Earth in an invisible cloud of anti-Nietzschean vapors. For Anthony and his wife, no fundamental mystery existed. Plagues went away, that was all. Contagions arrived slowly, they retreated by degrees, but eventually they did go.

  Only after the skull itself vanished did the Western world start believing in its collective heart that redemption was at hand. The dissolution occurred in stages. First fissures appeared, thousands of them, crisscrossing the surface until the Cranium Dei came to resemble an abused Easter egg. Next the teeth worked themselves loose, incinerating as they contacted the troposphere, a scene that alternately evoked the contrived razzle-dazzle of a fireworks display and the more natural spectacle of a meteor shower. Finally, the individual fragments descended, the flaming debris hitting the Atlantic Ocean and drifting irrecoverably into the Mohns Trench. For several weeks following God’s fall, the skies over North America and Europe seemed curiously empty, a void that most people eventually managed to fill through a newfound appreciation of stars, clouds, and red-tailed hawks.

  Expert opinion held that at least twenty-five years would elapse before Western civilization regained its infrastructure. It took ten. The average inhabitant of the Third Millennium found this era of frenzied rebuilding uniquely fulfilling, for how often is a technologically advanced civilization privileged to start all over again, reimagining itself from the ground up, avoiding most of its old mistakes and making only a few new ones? Yes, memories of the plague threw a shadow over the enterprise—abulia with its intolerable losses and unremitting grief—but if ever a society knew a Saturnia regna, it was the decade stretching from 2007 to 2017 as experienced by the industrialized democracies of planet Earth. To the question “Was the plague worth it?” the sane majority would have instantly replied, “No.” To the question “Did Jehovah make the right decision in abdicating?” this same sane majority would have answered unequivocally in the affirmative.

  Fueling the uncommon optimism, powering the unprecedented élan, was the huge reubenite brain in Saint Peter’s Square and its faithful guardian, Desiderius Erasmus. Whenever a pilgrim visited this strange combination of museum and cathedral, encyclopedia and shrine, he invariably emerged transformed. The brain did not teach its patrons how to bring Heaven to Earth, or even how to bring harmony to their households. Its visitors did not learn the meaning of life or the purpose, if any, of the universe. But they did acquire a taste for what Ockham called “the West’s great gift to the world, the miraculous faculty of rational doubt”—an ability so numinous and strange that even a spiritual guerilla like Oliver Cromwell could occasionally be provoked, in the bowels of Christ, to consider that he might be mistaken. Each pilgrim absorbed something else as well: a little myth or two, or three, an experience that for most people proved as galvanizing as a prayer breakfast with Saint Augustine, a beer with Jesus, badminton with the Buddha, or a dinner party hosted jointly by Dorothy Parker and Voltaire.

  In the opinion of many Gospel visitors, of course, the thing possessed supernatural powers. Gerard Korty, they noted, had decreed a tilt to the horizont
al axis, so that the sculpture would point toward “the God beyond God.” Cassie, the skeptic, rejected all such metaphysical explanations of the brain’s efficacy. That kind of thinking, she felt, belied Korty’s manifest intention to root humankind in the here and now. Anthony agreed. The given world was sufficient. To imagine otherwise was to be a mere tourist on this amazing planet when you could have become a citizen.

  Among the businesses that boomed during the golden decade was merchant shipping, a circumstance that sent Anthony on forty separate round-trip voyages between New York City and various European ports as master of the freighters SS Poseidon Lykes and SS Argo Hammer. He reached his seventieth birthday with a bank balance of $324,000—a sum sufficient to negate his principal incentive for finishing and publishing The Valley of Illusion. (On the night of his retirement party, he merrily burned the existing manuscript, ninety-eight pages, none worthy of a better fate.) Cassie, too, enjoyed employment throughout this era, teaching high school biology in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, the town where they’d settled after leaving LA. In the plague’s early months, Cedar Grove had been among several Jersey communities transformed into battlefields when the Anglo-Saxon Christian Brotherhood tried to stop the pestilence by attacking the local Jews. Now it was a placid and predictable place, qualities from which Anthony and Cassie drew considerable serenity after lives lived uncomfortably close to the eschatological bone. Their house at 319 Willowcrest Drive was an agreeable split-level with a birdbath and—over the garage—a sun-drenched, vaguely bohemian loft that Cassie found ideal for writing her unproduceable plays.

  The planet kept circling its sun. The whiskers that speckled the sink every morning after Anthony finished shaving turned pure white, as did the strands caught by Cassie’s hairbrush each night as she sat before her vanity. Stevie Van Home became Steve Van Horne, editor of the Cedar Grove High School yearbook, and then Dr. Stephen Van Horne, a dentist with a thriving practice in Montclair. Much to his parents’ delight, he ended up settling just around the corner in a ranch house that he shared with his marriage partner, a professional jazz saxophonist named Phillip Lawson. One glorious morning in October the postal carrier misdelivered to Anthony a letter from the Clearview County Courthouse (father and son were always getting each other’s mail) and so it was that, a full hour before the good news reached Stephen and Phillip, Barry Lawson-Van Home’s grandparents learned a marvelous fact: the adoption had become official. That night the four grown-ups plus three-year-old Barry celebrated by eating at the Octopus’s Garden in Bayonne, a “nonseafood restaurant” run by Sam Follingsbee, Anthony’s chief steward from the Carpco Valparaíso. Unlike the high supplied by hyperion-15, the evening’s euphoria was rooted in reality. Barry was a wonder: an irrepressible little person with black eyes, dusky skin, and a nascent sense of irony—and the older he got, the more wondrous he grew. By the time he’d turned six, the boy could name all the sails in Steve Dad’s collection of model square-riggers. That same year, he became transfixed by Phil Dad’s piano, soon learning to peck out nursery songs and Tschaikovsky themes.

  When Anthony first read that the Stone Gospel had reached Saint Peter’s Square through the combined efforts of his old partner in mishap, Nora Burkhart, and his former first mate, Marbles Rafferty, he assumed that finding his friends would be easy. They were, after all, the heroes of the new millennium. But both Nora and Marbles spurned the prophet role, disappearing from Rome as abruptly as they’d arrived. Although Anthony’s own experiment with arranged anonymity—his flight from the public eye following Matagorda Bay—had sprung from rather different motives, he believed that he understood his friends’ decision. Celebrity could be as confining as notoriety.

  An intermittent and disorganized seven-year search eventually brought him face-to-face with Marbles in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the aging sailor and his common-law wife, a recovered abulic named Naomi Singer, were managing a seaside bar, operating a charter fleet of fishing boats, and generally having a ball. Seeing each other for the first time in two decades, both men wept. Marbles was sorry to report that he had no idea where Nora might be hiding. They’d parted company in Boston, Marbles obsessed with nursing his thected lover, Nora still benumbed by grief.

  “Grief?”

  “You didn’t hear? Kevin had a relapse,” said Marbles.

  “He died?”

  “He died.”

  Anthony shook his head and sighed. “She probably knew the Lucido method was worthless—her sculptor friend must have told her When the end came, I expect she was prepared.”

  “Prepared? Sailor, that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard you say.”

  One sweltering August afternoon, summoned by the brass knocker, Anthony opened his front door, and there was Nora, standing on the porch, a battered suitcase in her hand, older, grayer, and thinner, but her large dark eyes and high cheekbones looking as formidable as ever. It developed that they’d missed each other in LA by a matter of weeks. She’d spent the last two decades running a ragtag Santa Monica theater troupe called Beggars on Horseback, acting and directing under her stage name, Inanna McBride, but she wanted to spend her final years with what remained of her family—her brother, Douglas, and his second wife, Perdita, whom she’d never met The cheapest maglev route to Boston involved a three-hour layover in New York City, and when a computer terminal in Pennsylvania Station displayed both an “Anthony Van Home” and a “Cassie Fowler” living at the same Cedar Grove address, she’d decided to extend her trip by a day.

  “I heard about Kevin,” said Anthony. They were sitting in his living room, drinking Dr. Zinger’s lemon herb tea and eating bricks of vanilla ice cream pressed between chocolate-chip cookies. “I’m so sorry.”

  She coughed and said, “I think about him every day.”

  “Yes.” He poured himself a second cup of lemon tea. “Well, friend, you proved me wrong. That wretched old steamer was good for one last trip.” He brought the tea to his lips and sipped. “I used to be a coffee fiend, but the damn stuff gave me migraines.”

  “I meant to hunt you up sooner,” she said, “but I knew it would only…you know, I’d start picturing”—a bright tear hovered in her eye—“the Natchez Queen and Esperanza’s place”—again she coughed—“Kevin setting his gods on the dock.”

  “I understand.”

  “We buried him in Massachusetts, Marbles and I, same cemetery where I got gas for my truck.”

  “A reliable seaman, Marbles.”

  “On Kevin’s birthday, I always watch Attack of the Crab Monsters.”

  “Do you have any idea what a great person you are, Nora?”

  “You’re pretty terrific yourself.”

  “No, I mean restoring the West to itself.”

  “I’m sick,” she said abruptly.

  “Would you like to lie down?”

  “I mean all the time. I’m sick, Anthony. When Catemaco blew, I sucked in a ton of dust. For years I was fine. Now the doctors say my lungs are full of holes. I’m dying, Captain, but I’m not afraid. I’ve had quite a life, wouldn’t you say?”

  A thousand regrets converged on Nora, some superficial, some profound, the difference mattering less with each passing day, as she sat in her brother’s Naugahyde recliner and suffered. It was a mistake, she realized, to have allowed Douglas and Perdita to tell the world that the Gospel’s mysterious paladin, last seen in Rome, had resurfaced in Boston, where she’d gone to die of emphysema. From Douglas’s perspective, of course, the announcement’s effect had been wholly benign, releasing a deluge of cards, letters, telegrams, e-mail, Bowers, and presents: affirmations that he hoped might raise her spirits and ease her breathing. But Nora felt worthy of neither public adulation nor private gifts. She hadn’t created the reubenite brain; she’d merely transported it. Every time Douglas read her an epistle of appreciation (yet another gushy account of how the brain had launched the correspondent’s career in astronomy, music, medicine, poetry, or counseling), Nora felt more alienated from herself, as if
the woman now expiring in Jamaica Plain and the woman who’d piloted the Natchez Queen down the boiling Uspanapa were two different people.

  “No more testimonials,” she told him. “I’ve heard enough.”

  “They’re helping you to love yourself.”

  “I love myself more than I deserve. Read me something else.”

  After their fourth such conversation, Douglas got the message. Not only did he and Perdita start reading Nora her favorite plays, he began dragooning Nora’s visitors into the troupe, assigning them parts and insisting on at least two run-throughs before they brought the show to her bedside. Nora passed her last days in a swoon compounded of Shakespeare and friendship, Ibsen and oxygen, Shaw and Demerol. She especially liked Anthony’s heartfelt interpretation of Ken Talley, the legless Vietnam veteran and schoolteacher at the center of Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July. The play’s final moments never failed to touch her: Talley reading aloud from his painstaking transcription of a science-fiction story conceived and then tape-recorded by a student who everyone thought doltish because of his severe speech impediment.

  “After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns”—before finishing the last sentence of the boy’s story, Anthony paused, resting his palm on Nora’s brow—“they realized that there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.”

  The performance she most wanted to hear, of course, Percy Bell as Orpheus—or Hamlet, Stanley Kowalski, Willy Loman, Ken Talley, anybody—would never happen. She’d learned his fate shortly after noticing in Daily Variety that “two mesmerizing young actresses, Vicky and Valerie Lotz,” were slated to star in the movie version of “Keeping Score, based on the nonfiction best-seller about Joyce and Janice Haworth, the identical-twin tennis champions who became serial killers specializing in wife beaters.” Nora’s former costars received her graciously on the set, which had just begun shooting within the high stucco walls of Paramount Pictures.